blogger interrupted

The Economist on proportionality, a relatively new concept in the conduct of war.

Proportionality is intimately bound up with notions of the just war, and has been enshrined in treaties regulating warfare’s conduct since the Hague Convention of 1907. But familiar as it is, proportionality is a slippery idea….

Proportionality in jus ad bellum and jus in bello are hard to separate: indiscriminate killing will colour the view of whether a war is justified; and even proportionate actions in battle will be denounced if the war is deemed unjust. 

Civilian deaths in war are inevitable, and became cataclysmic in number by 1945.  Governments began to place their entire military emphasis on those deaths, and attempted to limit war to limit those casualties.  If civilian deaths are always bad, than so is war.  

For decades, this was necessary, not just because war had become so awful in the 20th century, but because the prospect of new war in a nuclear era was even worse.  Apocalyptic, even.  American and global policy in the cold war thus painted with a very broad brush, from a pacifist, civilian death toll perspective, aimed at ending war as a tool of foreign policy.  

Why?  It has often been argued that the nuclear arms race kept the world at relative peace longer than any time before, because the prospect that any war at all, however minor, could lead to total nuclear war, was real.  It’s hard for young people to imagine today, but not so long ago kids (like me) went to bed at night wondering if the world would end tomorrow.  

This is the genesis of today’s focus on civilian casualties, within the media, the international community, and the wider public.  All the proxy conflicts of the cold war slowly became less war and more game; attempts to gain advantage with as little notice as possible, because over time, nothing drew more notice than civilian casualties.  War became so focused on a kind of cleanliness that America’s first post cold war forays into military action became exercises to see just how blood free a war could be.  

The bad guys never signed onto this pacifist paradigm.  Bosnia and Kosovo were total blood baths before NATO imposed stability almost without NATO casualties.  It’s quaint.  To paraphrase Sean Connery in The Untouchables, ain’t it just like NATO to bring a knife to a gun fight?

The nature of conflict in the 21st century creates a catch 22 within this paradigm.  As the soviet threat and the arms race toward armageddon both disappeared, Samuel Huntington was one of the first to recognize a different landscape.  Again, the Economist.

In “The Clash of Civilisations?” he presented a darker view. He argued that the old ideological divisions of the Cold War would be replaced not by universal harmony but by even older cultural divisions. The world was deeply divided between different civilisations. And far from being drawn together by globalisation, these different cultures were being drawn into conflict.

Whether you agree with Huntington or not, the post-cold war era has left a fundamentally different landscape upon which war is fought, one that makes our previously pacifist notions of war, forged out of the horrors of the 20th century, somewhat moot.  

We cannot apply a civilian death toll deterrent to today’s conflicts, because today’s conflicts now use civilians as combatants.  Whether in defense, as when terrorists hide in schools or mosques, or on offense, as when they attack towers in Manhattan, the nature of conflict today is civilian.  

That does not mean civilian casualties are now fair game to a civilized society.  It does mean that we are inching further away from the broad brush pacifist nature of cold war foreign policy, to a necessarily realpolitik approach.  

Hamas may be an arm of another great game, another proxy war with Iran on one side, and the rest of us on the other.  Thus, it may be an entirely pacifist argument to favor the destruction of Hamas.  Because if Hamas survives this latest round, Hamas will most certainly put more civilians into the crossfire, not by accident, but by design.  

Hamas is playing by rules that the international community has yet to agree to.  Unless and until Hamas is met on their own ground, and destroyed, the international community will continue to operate in this nether region between the reality of today, and the former reality.